DCI Banks(ITV1) is back for a second series, and things aren't going so well for Allan Banks (Stephen Tompkinson). His trusted colleague Annie is pregnant, about to go on maternity leave (as is the actor who plays her, Andrea Lowe); they're at the pub, having a fairly miserable evening, at the end of which she shouts at him for being so understanding. He doesn't understand why – I don't quite either, to be honest, and I'm not as drunk as he is. Then a taxi runs over his phone. Back at home his sleazy younger brother has left a cryptic voicemail begging for help. It appears to be the end of a long and terrible night.

He has no idea how terrible. Not yet. While he's taking a personal day to deal with his brother, a woman is found in a car with a bullet in her temple. Annie and her maternity cover, uptight mum-of-four DI Helen Morton (Caroline Catz), aren't rubbing along too well at the scene of the crime, and Banks isn't there to smooth things over. Also, the dead woman had a hand-drawn map of his house in her glove box.

Meanwhile, Banks can't find his wayward brother anywhere. Everyone else is looking for Banks, but all they find is an empty house and a crushed mobile phone. Before the afternoon is out his position has been usurped by a woman he's never met, who considers him a vital witness – perhaps even a suspect – in a murder investigation. That's why you shouldn't take too many personal days.

It's not exactly The Killing, but DCI Banks is sturdily and efficiently plotted. Each story is in two parts, so I can't tell you if this one ravels back up as well as it unravels, but its solid structure probably owes a debt to the Peter Robinson novel on which it is based. There is, however, some shockingly cliched dialogue: "I love him, you know," says the sleazy brother's girlfriend. "I mean, he's untrustworthy, immature, irresponsible, but when he smiles and turns on the charm …" Whenever a character you haven't met yet is subject to that sort of clunky summing up, it's safe to assume he's already dead.

What with being under suspicion most of the time, Banks didn't get to do much policing, but he remains an anchoring presence, with his pained, I-shouldn't-have-had-the-oysters expression. It's a promising return, and if the dialogue gets to you, you can always imagine they're speaking Danish.

A new series of the Great British Food Revival (BBC1) arrived to champion an item of produce you'd hardly think in need of rescue: the strawberry. There's certainly no shortage of them in supermarkets, even at times of the year when there ought to be. But chef Michel Roux was championing a specific kind of strawberry – the kind that aren't rubbish.

The vast majority of strawberries bought in this country are of one variety, Elsanta. Elsanta strawberries are big and red and lovely and taste of almost nothing. Chefs won't go near them, and they came bottom in a taste test by Wimbledon pundits Sue Barker and Tim Henman. There are dozens of better-tasting varieties out there. Why, asked Roux, can't we lobby for their reintroduction?

His enthusiasm for all things strawberry-related ("I love it! It is splendid!") wasn't dampened by the eventual answer, but mine was, a little. Elsanta's advantage over other strawberries is that it keeps well. By contrast the Cambridge Favourite – by everybody's account the strawberry that tastes "like strawberries tasted when you were a kid" – starts to go woolly about five hours after you pick it. It doesn't look ripe for a comeback at all. New varieties, which aim to combine old-fashioned flavour with Elsanta's indestructibility, are in development, but these things take time. The latest contender, the Malling Centenary, is scheduled for introduction next summer. Strawberries, it seems, don't need a revival. They need reinvention.

In the second half of GBFR, James Martin made the case for watercress, but it felt less an impassioned defence, and more like special pleading. "It's an ingredient in dramatic decline," he said, "thanks to fashionable foreign leaves like rocket invading our supermarkets." I like watercress, but I bristle at seeing it portrayed as the red squirrel of salad leaves. Apparently we used to eat 10,000 tonnes a year, and now it's more like 2,000. I suppose I could take on a few more bowls of watercress soup over a year, but I'm not upping my consumption fivefold. Not for anybody.